Sam and Max Season Two: Episode Two: Moai
Better Blues Review

by Gunther Schmidl

Episode 2 of Season 2 of Sam & Max starts off right where the first
episode left off: Sam and Max are back from the North Pole, Christmas
is almost saved, Max is still president, and Santa is in
hell dead. The setup wizard from the first episode is gone,
but at least you get to choose the options before the game proper
starts.

Once again, the game does not waste any time thrusting you into the
action, with a mysterious triangle chasing Sybil through the street
(yes, singular) of New York. It quickly turns out to be the Bermuda
Triangle acting as a portal to Easter Island, which not only houses
the originators of the portal but also talking stone(d) heads, Noah's
Ark, the Fountain of Youth, and a cunningly hidden secret cave of
mysterious mystery. Oh, and more portals. They are blue-ish and
yellow-ish, so unless you've lived under a rock for the past few
months, you probably know what this is parodying.

In case you have been living under a rock, the portals
allow Sam to stick his hand (or an item) through a triangle of one
color and have it come out the other. This is brilliantly integrated
into the puzzle design and used several times. The designers also
added enough potential portal pop-up places to keep the puzzles
non-obvious and, as in all good adventure gaming, there's a twist
later that requires some lateral thinking to apply previous knowledge
of portal physics to bend them to your own nefarious schemes.

Much less well integrated (and indeed as superfluous as it was in
the first episode) is yet another driving minigame, which lamely
parodies Guitar Hero, is no challenge at all, and overall feels
like one of those Fifteen puzzles that designers throw in to
artificially lengthen a game. This is the only sour note in an
otherwise excellent instalment of Sam & Max, but if there are three
more episodes with driving minigames, they'll get older more quickly
than Sam after drinking from the Reverse Fountain of Youth (that was a
lie).

Speaking of getting old, this new episode de-emphasizes the
well-known characters in favor of a host of new NPCs to speak to, from
the aforementioned stone heads to famous missing persons addicted to
the Fountain of Youth. Furthermore, most of the episode takes place
either on Easter Island or in the newly-introduced NYC locations of
Season 2. There is one more minigame aside from Bagpipe Obliteration
Ultimate (told you!), which I could handle quickly enough to not get
annoyed at it.

Other than that, there's not too much I can say about this episode
without giving away all its secrets. Aside from the unfortunate
Guitar Hero parody, the game is thoroughly enjoyable, funny,
and definitely not too easy, and I'm looking forward to the third
episode already. Fortunately, this time around, it's only a one-month
wait.